President Algonquin J. Calhoun?

Tom Roeser has an excellent observer in the Chicago Daily Observer about Governor Huckabee. The article, titled “Thought While Shaving: It Just May Be Huckabee’s Time” focuses on the Governor’s appearance before the Illinois Family Institute. Mr. Roeser says “I must say that the performance delivered by Mike Huckabee at the Illinois Family Institute was unrivaled.” Mr. Roeser goes on to say “In summary, I think it’s becoming Mike Huckabee’s time.”

In 2008 it seemed to many that Obama was the embodiment of sweet reason on race: a highly cultured Sidney Poitier type who starred in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”-the 1967 soft-liberal rendition that showed us a black physician who was every bit as sophisticated as the upper-class family played by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. But to many Obama has emerged as a dangerously unskilled president… maimed by his soft-hidden but nevertheless demonstrable black radicalism… to show himself as an immature, consummate narcissist really uneducated-and for all his suavity–a boob. He’s wearing very thin.

He’s even wearing thin with the Left: Howard Fineman of Newsweek and George Herbert of The New York Times editorial page… not to mention Frank Rich of the NYT. In short he’s beginning to be lampooned on Saturday Night Live as an unskilled orator who substitutes speech-ifying for strategy. With his speeches, he is coming very close to the caricature of Algonquin J. Calhoun, the fast-talking lawyer on radio and TV’s old Amos `n Andy… someone who can stretch definitions beyond the breaking point. Lawyer Calhoun was an egotist too… remember, people who are old enough?… who believed he could spin words faster than listeners could compute.

Johnny Lee is best known as the shyster lawyer Algonquin J. Calhoun in the Amos ‘N’ Andy TV Series. In some of the 1948-49 radio episodes where the Calhoun character is introduced, he is referred to as “Five Percent Calhoun” because his fee was 5% of whatever he got for his clients. Calhoun was often enlisted by The Kingfish to get him out of legal trouble or to help Kingfish rip Andy off with one of his investment schemes … This portrayal of a “coon lawyer” was perhaps one of the most offensive to middle class African Americans. The NAACP complained bitterly about the portrayal of “Negro lawyers … as slippery cowards, ignorant of their profession and without ethics.”

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